


Wicked One

by SAYS



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-28 02:01:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15038231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SAYS/pseuds/SAYS
Summary: For Judy -- Hermione enlists the help of Charlie to make the study of ancient runes a bit more exciting to some young students. In the process, however, they embark upon an unexpected journey that reveals just how little the world knows about dragons. ***Written for the SAYS Facebook Fic Exchange***





	Wicked One

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for this prompt and I hope you enjoy! I just want to keep writing!

The dark night was so still that not even the wind blew, nor did the creatures stir, nor could any sound be heard at all for that matter. The stream appeared to have ceased its flow to comply with the eerie synchronized stillness of the surrounding area.

Then, as if the silence had mounted for one precise moment it somehow anticipated, a single arrow pierced through the cool air, renting the night with a sharp and uncharacteristically loud whistle before impaling a tree but millimeters away from a man’s ear – a man who, with an involuntary intake of breath, closed his eyes in resignation of the inevitable fate that lie before him. 

“VICTOR!” a voice bellowed, sending a solitary bird flapping through the black night sky.

“I’m here,” the man said softly, now leaned up against the tree with the arrow, his eyes still closed.

A gigantic boulder sat about twenty feet in front of the man, and from around it emerged a group of people, eight in number, carrying fiery torches among them. The man leading the cavalcade carried a bow that he had not yet slung across his back.

“Victor!” the man in the front said again, this time with more of a spit of disgust.

The man against the tree, Victor, stood upright and crossed his arms. In the approaching light of the torches one could see that he was a young man with scraggly blonde hair, blue eyes, and a short albeit scruffy looking beard. His posture and attire suggested that he was generally a well-kempt man that had perhaps fallen on difficult times or else lost his way a bit. He had on a three-piece ensemble with a high lapel and starched collar, befitting of another time and place. In reality, his disheveled appearance was more a combination of living in the wilderness for some time now.

The man leading the group of seven others, still holding his bow as if anticipating Victor to make a wild run for it, had quite a different look about him. Beneath a fur hat were thick dark curls falling to his shoulders, just touching upon the dirty and tattered overcoat tied loosely around his lanky frame. 

If these two men did not contrast enough, the others appeared starkly different yet. Varying in heights, the smallest looking to be no older than perhaps twelve, the seven individuals who carried a few makeshift torches among them were dressed in mostly black robes. One of their number, a pretty woman, appeared a bit older and to be dressed more smartly, while another older looking man (though still young) was dressed in hide galoshes and a thick scaly apron-looking covering fit for dangerous elements. The rest looked to be young teenagers.

 _“Victor,”_ the man in the front with the fur hat said for a third time with something akin to fury stealing across his lips.

The group came to a halt a few feet from where the man called Victor stood pressed against the tree, and the man who seemed to hold a personal vendetta against this individual pressed in close, his face but inches from the other.

“Yitzhak,” Victor murmured, hardly daring to open his eyes.

There was a prolonged moment of silence in which their recognition of one another merely hung in the air.

The man wearing the scaly apron made an agitated noise. “Well?” he demanded. “Can this man help us or not?”

Yitzhak continued to stare into Victor’s slits of resigned eyes, both their faces producing beads of sweat in the heat of the crackling torches, before he finally took a step back and let out a roar of disquieting laughter.

The younger members of the group exchanged wary looks with one another and collectively they took involuntarily steps back from Yitzhak whose continued laughter added to a mounting sense of dis-ease. 

The two elder in the group, the man wearing the scaly apron and the woman, also exchanged nervous glances before the woman spoke up. “Victor, I take it? We have been told that you can help us return to where we came from – ”

“Do you not understand, Miss Hermione?” Yitzhak said, still wheezing between cackles. “He too is stranded in this time and place! He is of no use to you.”

Hermione blinked as she took in these words, glancing once more at her good friend Charlie, the only other adult in the vicinity. She dared not to look at the students for fear of revealing the despair that crept through her upon Yitzhak’s pronouncement.

The oldest looking student, a boy of seventeen with a pointed face and somewhat pompous demeanor, tutted. “If he is of no use to us, then we ought to punish him until he can give us some answers!” He whipped out his wand.

In that moment an invisible force pushed Hermione, Charlie, Yitzhak, and the five students backwards, knocking the wind out of them and knocking a few of them off their feet. Hermione regained her composure quickly and by the light of the torch in her hand she could just make out a menacing glint in the man Victor’s eyes.

“You may know me as Victor the Visceral,” he said in quite a different tone and posture than moments before, almost sneering. “I do not need a wand to call upon the deep magic from within.”

By this time Yitzhak had gotten to his feet. “No,” he said, “but I would hardly call it a deep magic from within – ”

“You speak of what you do not know, name practitioner,” Victor spat.

“Name prac – what?” Charlie stammered, confused. He helped the last of the students to their feet but none of them seemed able to step any closer to Victor whose face had transformed completely from one of quivering fear to vindictive malevolence. 

“I know with whom you associate!” Yitzhak screamed at Victor. “I know what it is you have been doing in the dark, in the secret places of the mountains! Whispers of your fell deeds go unheard amidst the cries of the smoldering villages, the mothers who have lost their children – ”

“And you think you are perfectly blameless in this, do you?” Victor said, eyes cutting sharply into Yitzhak’s. “You peddle books of charms and amulets to the Muggles. You purport to be some kind of _magic man_ who can heal their maladies.”

Yitzhak’s mouth twitched in disdain while Victor’s upper lip curled.

“Is that true?” Hermione said, turning to Yitzhak. “And we’ve been following your guidance this entire time!”

“Yitzhak the… what was it they call you?” Victor said. “Ah yes. The Deceiver.”

“That – that’s still nothing compared to you!” Yitzhak said, determining not to quail under Victor’s accusations. “You are responsible for the black clouds that roll down from the mountains, the foul stench that plagues the valley, the villages that lie in utter disrepair and desolation – ”

“These things you say may all be true,” Victor said, in a bored and tired tone, looking keenly at his hands. “But that does not change the fact that it was one of you who called upon the name of my dragon only to be transported to another time and place. Now, which of you was it?”

The silence that had pierced the night prior to this confrontation crept its way back in at these words. 

They all looked at one another, from the teacher, to the dragon handler, to the five students.

At last, the smallest student spoke.

“I think it was me?”

 

[In another time and place]

 

_“The study of ancient runes intertwines with the study of the very history of magic; this, in turn, opens the doorway to nearly every other area of study whether thus far promulgated by classical thought or otherwise. Various schools of witchcraft and wizardry place emphasis on the history of certain locales, but new areas of discovery give rise to pervasive questions that ought to be explored syncretistically for the universal advancement of magical thought and piecing together of divisive accounts of magical history. Utilizing the proposed methodologies of amalgamating varying cultural accounts to form one coherent narrative, we will now take a look at the esoteric offshoot of the fabled ‘Hidden Tzadikkim’ from late seventeenth and early eighteenth century Eastern Europe and this rune which can be roughly translated to mean ‘wicked ones.’”_

Thus began the symposium for the Mobility of Cross-Cultural Education in Witchcraft and Wizardry, held at Great Britain’s Ministry of Magic.

“Miss Granger!” came a voice.

Hermione, dressed smartly in black robes, turned from her conversation with the Bulgarian Minister of Magic to find Eloise Widdershins of the Council of Foreign Relations beckoning towards her. Hermione had always gotten along well with Eloise in their previous interactions, which were becoming more frequent leading up to the symposium.

“Eloise,” she said warmly. “Excuse me, Minister.”

“Miss Granger, I was not the only one who was impressed by your propositions, I see.”

“I am certainly glad to see how receptive people have been,” Hermione said. “I’ve now spoken to three foreign ministers who are interested in joint studies.”

“That is excellent to hear!” Eloise replied. “I am sorry to pull you away from what I am sure is a good connection for you to establish…” Her pink cheeks broke into an almost ecstatic smile. “But I happened to be sitting next to a board member from Hogwarts as well as Aldous Finnegan, Head of – ”

“The Department of International Magical Cooperation,” Hermione finished, interestedly.

“Precisely. And we are interested in bringing, perhaps, a less formal version of your dissertation to Hogwarts in what we are thinking could be a series of visiting scholars. Bridging the gap between the study of ancient runes, the history of magic, and I’m sure many other areas of study…”

“Well that sounds quite similar to what I was just discussing with the Bulgarian Minister!” Hermione said. “We could invite foreign students to such an event, I am sure the students of Hogwarts will be thrilled!”

 

In her years since Hogwarts, Hermione had continued her study of ancient runes and found it to be a fascinating field of unmined history. Following the successful symposium that the Ministry of Magic had organized, she found herself as something of a celebrity among the scholarly elite. Efforts to bring more cohesion to the wizarding world came about largely as a result of the defeat of Voldemort and those who had taken part in the war were excited to see more international magical cooperation.

Though discovering an ancient rune that had as yet been undiscovered, as far as Hermione could tell, was quite exhilarating to those who valued such movements within the realm of education and history, the audience was a bit less enthused when it came time to address a bunch of school children.

“Ancient runes, as I’m sure some of you know, delves into the territory of the very roots of magic. We wave our wands, we learn our spells, but where does this magic really come from? Within this area of study is a careful study of the history of magic…”

After several months of preparing to address the students of Hogwarts, Hermione found herself with an audience of around thirty unenthused students, six of them from Durmstrang. The students yawned. Professor McGonagall stood in the back of the classroom (the series of visiting scholars had been allotted to meet in the Great Hall, but considering the attendance, had been moved to accommodate a smaller crowd). She smacked one student in the back of the head who had just let out a loud snore.

It seemed that at the words “history of magic,” the remainder of the students decided to internally check out.

Hermione smiled a bit sinisterly. 

“Are you all regretting that you signed up for this lecture?” She looked around at the crowd. A small boy from Durmstrang looked keenly interested but he appeared to be the only one. A seventh year from Ravenclaw looked determined to stay awake as he held parchment and was scribbling down Hermione’s every word.

They had just completed an exercise on rune interpretation and several runes were scrawled across the chalkboard.

“I understand,” Hermione said, “that at this stage in your education, you want to learn the fancy spellwork. But learning where that comes from will put you legions ahead of your classmates and begin you on a path towards higher education after your O.W.L.s and N.E.W.T.s. That being said… I had a feeling some of you might find this a bit boring. That’s why I brought a special guest.”

Some of the students perked up when a man who had been seated in the back of the classroom, unnoticed until this point, stood up and came to join Hermione at the front of the class.

“Allow me to introduce Charlie Weasley,” Hermione said.

“Hello!” Charlie said. 

A few of the students sat up straighter as they took in his odd attire which comprised of hide galoshes and a thick scaly apron. The small Bulgarian boy could hardly contain his excitement as he seemed familiar with persons dressed in such a manner.

“I am a dragon handler!” Charlie said. “You’re probably wondering what I’ve got to do with ancient runes… Hermione?”

“As I’ve mentioned,” Hermione said, “the things you learn about in school are all intertwined. We as a community of witches and wizards are only beginning to scratch the surface of certain aspects of history. Well, in addition to bringing Charlie here as a special guest, he too has brought a guest.”

At this, Professor McGonagall sternly addressed the students. “Up! All of you! We are going on a trip to the grounds. Form a single file line and follow Miss Granger and Mr. Weasley. And please hand in your consent forms that I asked you to bring.”

The students all looked around at one another nervously. 

“What, have you all forgotten?” McGonagall snapped. 

The Bulgarian boy and the Ravenclaw boy both promptly offered their slips of parchment to McGonagall. Three other students rummaged around in their bags to find their permission slips. It appeared, however, that the remaining students had forgotten.

“Very well,” McGonagall said. “The rest of you are dismissed. I expect two rolls of parchment from _each of you_ about what you have learned today. As well as detention for your _abysmal_ participation.”

The students all groaned and filed out of the classroom.

“Well,” said Hermione, “I guess you five are the lucky ones. Shall we take them to the enclosure?”

Charlie nodded. He and Hermione led the way out through the Entrance Hall while McGonagall went to corral the rest of the students.

“My father has taught me all about runes,” the Bulgarian boy said to no one in particular. “That’s why he sent me to Durmstrang – we have a much stronger focus on deep magic.”

“And we don’t?” the Ravenclaw boy rolled his eyes, brushing past the boy to walk near Charlie and Hermione.

“What are all of your names?” Charlie said, turning while he walked.

“I’m Gregory Matthews,” said the Ravenclaw. “Head Boy.”

Hermione and Charlie both glanced at each other and held in a laugh, for he reminded them both of Percy. The rest of the students identified themselves as Sabrina Alger, another Ravenclaw, Peter Donovan, a Hufflepuff, Casey Wright, a Gryffindor, and Constantine Dobre, the single Durmstrang student.

By now the group had made their way across the grounds and began trekking through the Forbidden Forest. The warm summer air lowered a few degrees as the trees thickened and the students, who had begun talking amongst themselves, got quiet.

“Where are we going?” Gregory asked. “Is it even safe to be out here?”

A loud roar interrupted his question and the ground shook. It was quite unlike the roar of any creature they may have learned about in Care of Magical Creatures, and the students all came to an abrupt halt.

Charlie and Hermione stopped to look behind them and noticed five very frightened faces. Constantine, of course, was still bursting with excitement, albeit nervous excitement.

“That’s a dragon!” he squealed. 

The rest of the students waited for Charlie or Hermione to correct the boy.

“Right you are,” said Charlie.

After several more silent paces onwards, they came at last upon the enclosure. A handful of dragon handlers were running about this way and that in front of a fifty-foot stone wall that hid the creature from view. As Hermione and Charlie led the five students through the trees, a small cluster of people turned at the sound of their approaching footfalls.

“Aha! What a small group! No one else wanted to get this up close and personal?” The voice belonged to Aldous Finnegan, Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation.

Next to him stood Eloise Widdershins, a representative from the Bulgarian Ministry who didn’t speak much English, and the head dragon handler, a rather gruff man with facial piercings and tattoos visible in the gap between his gloves and his sleeves.

Another thunderous roar rent the stillness of the forest and everyone jumped except for the dragon handlers.

“Come on then,” Charlie beckoned to the students, ushering them all towards Finnegan.

“Before we go into the enclosure – ” he began.

“ _Into_ the enclosure?!” the Ravenclaw girl, Sabrina, said.

“We’ve created a viewing space that is protected by magical barriers – you won’t actually be in any danger,” Eloise interjected. “So before we go in, we thought we’d tell you a little bit about the significance of this field trip.”

“What are the cores of each of your wands?” Hermione asked the students.

“Unicorn tail hair,” Gregory said at once.

“Mine too,” said Peter the Hufflepuff.

“Phoenix feather,” said Casey the Gryffindor.

“Jackalope antler,” said Sabrina the Ravenclaw.

“Jackalope antler!” Finnegan said interestedly. “That’s a new one! What’s your surname, young lady?”

“Alger. But this one’s been passed down for centuries,” she said, proudly holding up a sleek ivory-looking wand. “From the Sayre family.”

“Merlin’s beard,” Finnegan said keenly. “Well aren’t we lucky to have a Sayre at Hogwarts! And how about you, my boy?”

“Dragon heartstring,” Constantine piped up.

“As interesting and powerful as I’m sure each of your wands are,” Finnegan said, eying the jackalope wand one last time, “that is the one I was hoping one of you might have. Who knows anything about dragon heartstrings?”

“Well, I’d presume they come from the hearts of dragons,” Gregory said.

Another roar shook the ground and caused everyone to jump.

The head dragon handler spoke up. “Wand makers are very careful of which dragons they harvest, and if they’re not, we make sure they are.”

A few of the students looked aghast at the word “harvest.”

“First off, the dragon’s gotta be dead,” he said. “There’s been strict regulations for the past couple of centuries on the killing of dragons because they are so rare and powerful. That, and some people went a bit crazy with dragon breeding before these regulations were in place.”

“People _breed_ dragons?” Gregory said.

“Yeah, idiot, where do you think they come from?” Peter sniggered. 

“There is no such thing as a dumb question,” Hermione said. “It’s true – very little is actually known about dragons, from their origins to their magical properties to even their procreation and why they have been dying out. It’s really kind of disturbing to think that anyone ever thought to harvest their hearts to make wands – but considering that the dragon must have already died makes it a bit more bearable, as I too carry dragon heartstring in my wand.”

“Any questions so far?” Eloise said.

“Um… where did this one come from?” Peter asked, pointing toward the stone enclosure.

They heard the sound of thick chains and snorting. The dragon handlers continued running around and in and out of the enclosure from an entrance on the other side.

“Excellent question,” Charlie grinned. “The dragon you’re about to meet is a Hungarian Horntail. The same one, in fact, that we brought here a number of years ago for the Triwizard Tournament.”

“Can be a right nasty piece of work, this one,” said the head handler. “Damn near impossible to get close enough to study. Took us a couple years to figure out that it was a male and not a female, as we’d originally thought.”

“We never would’ve allowed him in the tournament if we knew he was a male…” Charlie added. “Females are vicious, don’t get me wrong, but the males are more brutish. And this one was very protective of an egg so we just assumed.”

“What else does this have to do with ancient runes?” Sabrina asked.

“Excellent question!” Hermione said. “As we talked about in the lecture portion today, new runes are being discovered that tie pieces together of different magical backgrounds.” She pulled out her wand and drew the rune in the air, the same one that she had drawn on the chalkboard back in the classroom, so that it now hung in the air in shimmering gold.

Constantine looked at it quite interestedly and screwed up his face in concentration.

“Well let’s not delay any longer! Shall we?” Finnegan said.

Charlie and the head dragon handler looked grimly at one another, but Finnegan, Hermione, and Eloise all looked ecstatic. The Bulgarian representative looked as though he hadn’t a clue as to what was going on.

Finnegan buoyantly led the way round the side of the enclosure to a doorway in the stone wall through which he ushered the rest of them. It was almost like a tunnel, cut straight out of the stone, that one might find in a zoo exhibit. And on the interior of the stone a large window had been cut that held a faint haze of spellwork, similar to the shimmer of a freshly blown bubble, that protected the humans from the dragon that resided just on the other side.

It reminded Hermione a bit of the enclosure that had been used at the Triwizard Tournament, for a good number of large rocks and boulders obscured all but the creature’s black, lizard-like tail whose end curled right in front of them. 

“Can you get it to turn around?” Gregory asked. 

“I think I’ve seen enough of it!” Sabrina said in a high-pitched voice. 

“Can we get it to turn around?” Finnegan said, echoing Gregory and turning towards the handler. 

The handler looked uncomfortable but seemed remiss to argue with a Ministry official. “Come with me,” he said, gesturing for Finnegan to follow him back out of the enclosure. 

Eloise and the Bulgarian official followed them back, leaving Charlie and Hermione with the students to observe the dragon.

“Are they getting it to turn around?” Gregory said, turning to Charlie.

“Maybe, I don’t know,” Charlie said. “As they’ve said, this guy here is a piece of work…” he said, gesturing to the tail that lay on the ground outside the enchanted window.

“Can you tell us more about the dragon history?” Peter asked. “They don’t teach about that in history of magic…”

Before Hermione could answer, the tail abruptly disappeared from view and the students all groaned (except for Sabrina). But then, silently and stealthily, the dragon’s head popped up from behind a very large boulder followed by its shoulders. He seemed to have spotted his audience and he lowered himself into view, suddenly letting out a great huff of fire that would have enveloped them all had it not been for the enchantments on the window. 

As the clouds of fire cleared, the rest of the dragon’s body came into view and the students now laid their eyes on the massive, scaly, black creature that stretched his wings over his head in a clear show of dominance. 

The dragon then made a snakelike rattling sound and the seven onlookers simply stood still, in awe of his magnificence. He lowered his head a bit closer to the window and they could see that his black eyes had a faint red ring around his slit like pupils. 

Sound itself disappeared and time stood still, or perhaps it swirled all around, as a ring of luminescent white flames emerged in a great circle around the dragon and behind the onlookers, enclosing them with him. The white flames shot up through the air, unfettered by the stone wall, and glittering stars appeared all around before everything went black.

 

Questions arose out of the nothingness, such as: Where I am? Am I attached to this present reality? What is my purpose here? _Who am I?_ Why can’t I just die already –

Hermione opened her eyes and saw stars above her, smattering a clear night sky. She took in a large gulp of cool air, quite unlike the warmth of impending summer that had filled her lungs but moments before –

“Hermione!”

Hermione rolled to her side, now realizing that she had been lying flat on her back, and could just make out the shadowy figure of Charlie lying several feet away from her. He clambered to his feet and reached out for Hermione’s hands to help her find footing.

“The students – ” she began.

“AUGHH!” came a yell from some twenty feet behind them.

As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Hermione counted one – two – three – four – five figures on the ground some distance behind where she had landed. Without knowing what had happened, she ascertained that she had “landed,” for the back of her head and back felt the residual impact of being hurdled to this foreign location.

She and Charlie both rushed around and helped each of the students to their feet.

“Where are we? What happened?” Sabrina squealed.

“I don’t know – ”

“It was the dragon!” Constantine’s voice chimed in.

“What do you mean, the dragon?”

“Did anyone else feel that awful feeling?”

“WHERE ARE WE?” Sabrina said again, thoroughly panicked. 

“Everyone just stay calm!” Hermione said loudly. She lit her wand and they all fell silent as they took in their surroundings.

They were in the middle of a field, tall grass blowing gently in a cool breeze. A tree line some distance away was silhouetted upon the glimmering light of an otherwise black sky. It was eerily silent.

Hermione and Charlie exchanged looks but chose not to voice their confusion and panic in front of the students.

“I think there are Dementors nearby,” said Casey, the third year Gryffindor boy.

Hermione inwardly agreed, having felt that familiar sensation of utter despair in the moments before opening her eyes.

“That’s ridiculous, what makes you say that?” said Charlie. “Dementors aren’t in Ministry employ anymore.”

“I remember Dementors, they came into my house when I was a kid,” Casey said. “I felt the same way then.”

“Well I don’t see anything around us,” said Hermione, carefully scanning the tree line and the open field.

Charlie moved closer to Hermione and lowered his voice so that the students wouldn’t hear. “We could send up a flare?” he whispered.

Hermione continued scanning the darkness all around and had the odd sense that they were not alone. The students began bickering amongst themselves but Hermione shushed them.

“Show yourself!” she said loudly.

The students all looked around with wide, terrified eyes. Hermione thought for a moment that she had caused another unnecessary panic when no voice responded, but then – 

“Are you the _Tzadikim?_ ” came a gruff, unfamiliar, and accented voice from the tree line. 

Hermione’s eyes widened. “We do not know of whom you speak!” she responded sternly. “We do not know where we are and we would like to return to where we came from!”

A rustle in the tall grass announced the added presence of the previously disembodied voice. Charlie lit his wand and quickly ushered the students behind him as the man approached. As he stepped into the light of the wands, they took in the sight of a dirty looking man wearing a fur hat and tattered overcoat, with a bow held tightly in his hands.

“Who are you?” he demanded, one hand held behind him, ready to draw an arrow.

“My name is Hermione Granger, and this is Charlie Weasley. We just appeared in this field and we do not know how we got here.”

“I see you have wands,” the man said.

“Are you a wizard?” said Charlie.

“Well obviously, but I should hardly go around saying that!” the man snapped.

“Could you tell us where we are?” Hermione said.

“A better question I could ask you, where is he?” the man demanded, his hand twitching toward the arrows slung over his shoulder.

“Where is who?”

 _“Victor!”_ he spat.

“I’ve told you, sir, we do not know how we got here or where we even are!” Hermione said heatedly. “Who are you, anyway?”

“My name is of no use to you, but I will answer your first question: you are in the outskirts of Medzhybizh. Judging by your wayward appearance, however, I assume that does not answer your question. And a better question to ask would be _when_ are you. For that answer you may be a bit more perturbed to find that the year is 1767.”

This pronouncement hung in the air for a moment. 

“What… what do you mean?” Hermione said.

The man looked at them rather smugly. “I can see that you are not the _Tzadikim._ Come with me, I will answer your questions.”

Hermione and Charlie looked at each other worriedly.

“Tell us your name,” Charlie demanded.

“Yitzhak,” he said, turning away and beginning once more toward the tree line. “Well? Are you coming?”

Gregory opened his mouth to protest by Charlie shushed him before he could start. The group followed tentatively behind Yitzhak who walked briskly through the tall grass into the darkness of the forest. Sabrina looked on the verge of hysterical tears so Hermione took her free hand to guide the girl beside her.

Charlie and Hermione both held their wands out on either side of the group to help the students see while Yitzhak led them through the trees as if he knew the terrain quite well.

“Come along, not far now,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s a cave at the foot of the mountain.”

At last the eight of them rounded a corner and found the entrance to the cave that Yitzhak had spoken of. At this point Hermione saw that he withdrew a wand from his coat pocket and used it to light a torch with which he led them into the blackness of the rocks.

“Why do you use a torch when you have a wand?” she said.

He glanced at her but didn’t answer, returning the wand to his pocket and leading them through a cavernous tunnel before they ended up in a cozy yet spacious clearing where Yitzhak apparently lived. There were various blankets and sacks, a few pots and pans, an assortment of books, and a fire in the middle with a large steaming pot.

“Stew?” he said at last.

“Where are we?” Sabrina said for the umpteenth time.

“I’ve already told you that!” Yitzhak said, a bit annoyed. He threw a few blankets at Hermione and gestured for his visitors to sit.

Still with wide eyes, they all found places to sit around the fire within the cave and looked to Yitzhak to begin answering their unasked questions.

Yitzhak withdrew his wand once more and poked it at the steaming pot. He conjured a bowl for himself and lifted a bit of the contents into it and abruptly began eating. 

“Well?” said Hermione. 

“You know, for guests, you all are rather rude,” he said through a mouthful.

“How did we get here?” Charlie demanded.

Yitzhak took another large mouthful and appeared thoroughly at ease as it slid down his throat. He then rolled his eyes as he detected the agitation mounting among his guests. “You all are acquainted with Victor Gödel?”

“Who?” said Charlie.

Yitzhak raised his eyebrows. “Then how did you get here?”

“That’s exactly what we’d like to know!”

Yitzhak continued wolfing down his stew but seemed to have developed a new interest in the group of witches and wizards.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I am rightfully rather mistrustful of people wandering about these regions, particularly in the dead of night. Though that seems to make less and less of a difference these days… What year are you all from?”

“Two thousand and five,” Constantine said, earning him a look from Charlie and Hermione which clearly said _Let-the-grown-ups-do-the-talking._

Yitzhak spat out his current mouthful (causing Sabrina to jump), and said, “Are you really? My oh my…”

“Please, Mr. Yitzhak,” Hermione said, changing her demeanor, “Can you explain to us what is going on – in 1767?”

The man leaned back, adjusting his bags and blankets in the corner to make himself more comfortable, and removed his fur hat to reveal dark, curly hair.

“We are on the outskirts of a Jewish village,” he said, “in Ukraine. A number of years ago – more than a century, in fact – a group that called themselves the _Hidden Tzadikim_ began traveling in this territory. I thought that perhaps you were associated with them; the majority are do-gooders, spreading the good news of Torah to villagers all across the region. In recent times, however… Magical men have infiltrated their ranks. A true _Tzadik_ , or righteous one, would never admit to being so, as the hidden nature of their calling would purport, but these magical men have hijacked the calling and preyed upon the superstitions of the masses, spreading messages of darkness and evil, to the point where you never really know who is good and who is bad.”

“And Victor Gödel?” Hermione prompted.

Yitzhak’s eyes darkened. “Victor is an Austrian wizard who has made something of a home for himself in these mountains, calling upon truly terrible magic. He is their leader.”

“But you also carry a wand,” Hermione said, careful to phrase it as a statement and not an accusation.

“I do,” Yitzhak said. “Many Jews are practiced in the art of magic, calling upon the true source. But that is a tale for another time. Some see carrying a wand as an abomination, as blasphemy – like taking magic upon yourself and forgetting where it truly comes from.”

Inwardly, Hermione’s mind was spinning and she wished she could take notes on everything this man said, for it coincided with her current area of study and unmined magical history.

“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Abracadabra’? In Hebrew it translates to ‘I create as I speak.’ In ancient days, wands were not a necessity – calling upon the true source of magic was adequate, albeit a difficult practice that only the most knowledgeable and holy could master. But as the ages went on, it was discovered that wands were useful in channeling that power, particularly with a magical core.”

“I have dragon heartstring!” Constantine said, producing his wand from his pocket, and once more earning him a look from Charlie and Hermione.

“I am sorry to hear that,” Yitzhak said darkly. “But of course you do, coming from two thousand and five.”

“What do you mean by that?” Hermione said. “What’s wrong with dragon heartstring?”

“Well what do you think Victor is doing!” Yitzhak spat with contempt, bits of stew spilling onto his beard. “He breeds dragons and casts enchantments upon their hearts before they are even hatched, etching treachery upon their souls and setting the monsters loose onto our villages! There is a name for the Tzadikim who have turned to the darkness, one that we do not utter here, but an accurate translation would be ‘Wicked Ones’!”

Hermione’s mind began reeling once again… The rune she had discovered… Could that be what brought them here?

She slowly withdrew her wand, so as not to appear threatening, and traced the symbol, leaving the glittering gold rune in the air.

Yitzhak’s eyes widened. “Take that accursed thing out of the air! You are Victor’s followers, aren’t you?!” he demanded, jumping to his feet.

“No!” said Hermione, also jumping to her feet. “I study ancient runes! I discovered this symbol and began tracing its origins – these are students of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry! We do not know how we got here – I promise you, we do not have evil intentions – ”

“Well then how about we go find Victor and see what he has to say!” Yitzhak said, madness in his eyes. “If you are truly not acquainted with him, perhaps he would be so kind as to return you to your day and age!”

Yitzhak snatched up his bow and arrow from beside him, placed his fur hat atop his head, and began storming back through the tunnel of the cave.

“Please, sir!” Hermione said desperately, glancing at Charlie. “We only want to return to where we came from!”

“Be that as it may,” Yitzhak said angrily over his shoulder, “Victor will be the only one who can help you anyway! They say that he comes from another century as well!”

Hermione hurried after Yitzhak to keep pace while Charlie corralled the students after her. And out through the tunnel they went, lighting torches among them, and journeying briskly through the woods. Up they went, on a narrow pathway along the side of the mountain.

 _“Victor!”_ Yitzhak’s voice rang out with maddening fury as he huffed through the mountainous terrain. At last, he held up his hand for the group to halt, and with swift deftness he shot an arrow through the darkness, and softly, oh so softly, a voice said, _“I’m here.”_

Hermione watched as the man Victor cowered under the threat of Yitzhak’s bow. A brief exchange took place between these two wizards, both from different eras. Then an invisible force pushed all of them away from Victor and his face changed.

 _“You may know me as Victor the Visceral,”_ he could be heard saying, but his voice seemed far away. _Something about not needing a wand._

Hermione wracked her brain. _Victor the Visceral…_ That did sound a bit familiar. She felt that the name would ring a bell more readily if indeed this man had anything to do with dragon breeding, but alas, if that were true, it was not in any textbook or historical text that she had run across. But the surname Yitzhak had mentioned, Gödel, sounded vaguely familiar. 

“But that does not change the fact that it was one of you who called upon the name of my dragon only to be transported to another time and place. Now, which of you was it?”

Hermione blinked and found herself turning to look at the youngest student, the Durmstrang student, no less – Constantine, just as he opened his mouth to tentatively say,

“I think it was me?”

Victor, though protected by some shield enchantment, had still been leaning up against the tree. At these words he bounced to his feet and smiled maddeningly.

“Well then he’s nearby, isn’t it?” he said excitedly, tapping his fingers together.

“Hold on!” Yitzhak hollered. “You still have to answer for what you have done!”

“Please, can’t you two quarrel another time?” Charlie said. “We really need to get back to our own time.”

“You seem to already know each other anyway,” Peter the Hufflepuff said.

“Yeah…” said Hermione, previously too distracted by trying to remember who Victor the Visceral was to be struck by how easily Yitzhak seemed to find him or, moreover, how they seemed to know each other.

“Well Yitzhak the Deceiver used to be a _hidden tzadik,_ ” Victor sneered, “until his wayward magical style got him stripped of his ordination, isn’t that right? And then he joined ranks with me so that he could hone the deep magic, the visceral wand-less magic that we were born with.”

Hermione expected an outraged response from Yitzhak, but he had lowered his bow and arrow and merely shrugged at these words.

“Hardly seemed worth mentioning,” he said, like a little schoolboy caught breaking a rule but pretending it was less severe than it really was.

“Wait – ” said Charlie, turning back and forth to each of these men “but I thought you were trying to help us! Are _you_ the one colluding with him?”

“Ha!” Victor laughed. “If Yitzhak hasn’t been forthright with you – which he hardly ever is – what makes you think that everything he’s told you about _me_ is true? Perhaps I’m the one you ought to be listening to!”

“But you have an evil face,” Peter said bluntly. 

“See?” said Yitzhak. “Even the children can tell.”

“That’s because they’re more in tune with the visceral magic, it hasn’t been entirely lost yet.”

“So you’re admitting to being evil?” Sabrina said.

Hermione, sensing that the students were somehow becoming more comfortable in an entirely uncomfortable situation in which she really couldn’t trust either of these strangers who possessed some kind of deep wand-less magic, decided something had to be done. 

“WAIT!” she said, interrupting Victor’s catty response to whatever was being said. “Can we back up to the part about the time-travelling dragon? How do we time-travel back to where we came from?”

“Well you call upon his name, of course, and enact his power,” Victor said matter-of-factly. “Assuming he is still around and hasn’t abandoned me again – I’d rather like to leave this place too.”

“Constantine?” Hermione said, turning and leaning down slightly to the boy’s level. “What did you do before? How did you know the dragon’s name?”

He looked back at her, wide-eyed. “I didn’t! It was the rune you drew! I just thought it looked very much like a – a fancy way of writing, or calligraphy – of a Hebrew word I know – here – ”

He traced the symbol through the air once more, in shimmering gold. Hermione, focused on the rune, did not notice Victor’s stone-faced and calculating stare.

“See, the letters are overlaid – ” Constantine began.

“Well what does it say?” Gregory demanded, oddly silent until this point.

“I don’t remember the English translation,” Constantine said, screwing his face up in concentration. “But I know the Hebrew. And I guess I said it out loud, and that’s when everything went all funny and black.”

“Go on and say it then,” said Victor quietly. 

“Why him? Why not you? What will happen?” Hermione said sharply.

Victor shrugged, as if he knew the exact answer but would not let on. “It might come across better coming from an innocent child. My dragon and I – we aren’t on the best of terms…”

“Will it be all right?” Hermione said, turning instead to Yitzhak.

His eyes were wide as he stared at the symbol shimmering in the air. “I don’t know.” 

At these words Hermione sensed that he truthfully did not know, and that he was perhaps as dumbfounded as the rest of them.

“I don’t suppose it can do any harm when the alternative is staying in the year 1767…” Yitzhak said, unsure. “It’s really your only shot.”

Hermione and Charlie looked at each other worriedly, then looked to each of the students: Gregory, though smarmy, white in the face; Sabrina, the most shaky of all, seeming to regain her boldness despite the despair of the situation; Peter, a snarky joker of a boy, looking amused and engaged in a way that he probably had never been before in a classroom; Casey, stoic and unreadable; and Constantine, nervously holding all the cards.

“Well…” Hermione said. “Go on then, I suppose…” She internally attempted to brace herself for whatever outcome.

Constantine closed his eyes for a moment and his eyeballs could just be made out rolling back and forth under the lids. The silence mounted for a moment while they all seemed to hold their breath.

_“Rasha.”_

Nothing happened.

They waited in silence for several minutes until Yitzhak’s cry of outrage rent the night.

 _“You named your dragon after yourself?!”_ he cried, throwing his bow down on the ground along with his fur hat. He too collapsed onto the ground with a great moan of despair and began tearing at his hair.

But then a sickening screech announced the presence of another.

A blaze of fire shot out of the darkness that swirled just a few feet to their right, causing them all to jump back at the startling wave of heat. As the flames cleared, the ground shook and the Hungarian Horntail stood there, snarling.

The familiar white flames that had encircled them some time before, emerging out of nothingness and shooting upwards, suddenly illuminated the clearing. These flames, however, were not hot, and were accompanied by glittering stars all around that dissolved the rest of the scenery before everything went black.

And with a thud, Hermione opened her eyes to blazing heat and a blinding white sky.

“Where are we now?” came Gregory’s voice from some distance away.

Hermione rolled over, her eyes adjusting to the brightness of their new setting, and found that their party of nine was on a beach of pebbles near a shoreline amidst little huts off in the distance. 

Charlie quickly got to his feet and helped Hermione to hers before helping each of the students. Yitzhak and Victor both got to their feet and looked around, confused. 

“How does he do that?” Yitzhak demanded of Victor. “That is sinister even for one of your beasts, to bend time and space – I’ve never heard of such a –”

“Look!” Peter said, gesturing behind them.

A great mountain stood on their side of the shore, some distance behind them. But it was not just any mountain. Black billowing clouds of smoke filled the sky, rising up and up and slowly encroaching upon the shoreline. In the opposite direction, in which Hermione had first laid eyes, the sky was still a blinding white. 

“Is that…” She squinted her eyes and shook her head, hardly daring to believe what she saw. 

Barely discernible among the black clouds at the top of the mountain – the volcano – were at least a dozen winged creatures. Dragons. 

Before Hermione could begin to wrap her head around the new situation in which they found themselves, the sound of someone running towards them caught her attention.

A figure wrapped in loose black cloaks and shawls approached, kicking up pebbles with each footfall. The person wore sandals and held a bit of the black shawl over their face. As the individual got closer Hermione noticed that there were bangles and jingly things attached to the black linen. It was a woman.

She frantically yelled in some other language at them.

“What?” Charlie yelled back.

She came to a halt about fifteen feet from them.

“You must leave here!” she said in English, still holding her shawl over her face. “The volcano will erupt soon, everyone is fleeing!”

“A dragon brought us here!” Constantine said.

The woman’s dark eyes widened and she dropped her hand, revealing a pretty face. She looked from one face to the next and her eyes stopped on Victor, at which point her face crumpled.

 _“Victor?”_ she murmured, dropping to her knees on the pebbled beach.

Hermione turned to Victor and saw that he too wore a pained look. 

Victor slowly, numbly walked towards the woman, stopping beside her, dropping to his knees, and wrapping his arms around her shaking shoulders as she wailed.

Hermione, Charlie, Yitzhak, and the students merely watched as the woman gasped for air, unable to contain her emotions. 

“Victor,” she murmured. “Oh how long it has been!”

The volcano made a great grumbling sound as more thick black smoke unfurled from its mouth.

“Er,” Yitzhak said, “sorry to interrupt, but what exactly are we supposed to do about that?”

Victor turned toward the rest of the group and stood up, helping the woman to her feet. “This is Priscilla. I think she can help us.”

The woman, Priscilla, blinked back tears and wiped her face. “Come, I have shelter just down the beach.”

The rest of them followed Priscilla and Victor at a brisk pace towards a hut just around a bend. The roof of the hut was comprised of branches and greenery from tropical trees, and little shells and skulls of small creatures hung from the entryway. Priscilla ushered them all in and, upon entry, they found the interior to be magically spacious and decorated with an assortment of lit candles and jars filled with strange substances.

“I suppose I ought to introduce myself,” she began. “I am Priscilla, though most people here in Pompeii know me as the Medicine Woman.”

 _“Pompeii?”_ Gregory said incredulously, voicing what the rest of them immediately thought. “We’re in _Pompeii?_ As in, Mount Vesuvius – ”

A rumble from the volcano answered his question.

“Yes,” Priscilla said. “It’s AD 79. I know this because I am not from this time either – it was 1908 when I… Well, needless to say, we all have times we would like to return to. I have been here for twenty-three years.”

They all merely stood with their mouths open.

Priscilla turned once more to Victor. “We haven’t any time to waste, its about to erupt…”

“What is going on?” Yitzhak demanded. “Victor, how do you know this woman?”

“She was my student,” Victor replied without expression.

“You have brought the dragon with you, I assume?” Priscilla said to Victor. “Of course, how else would you have gotten here…”

“More like he brought us,” Victor said. “But why?”

“Oh don’t you see?” she said. “This eruption has long been predicted by the centaurs, in fact even in our time they were predicting it because _it hadn’t happened yet._ All the arithmancy and divination, I have been studying it all this while! This is the gathering of the dragons – all of their power summoned to one location…”

“But what does he want?” Victor said quietly, aware that everyone was listening to this exchange.

Priscilla’s face became stoic. “Desolation.” She withdrew an ivory-looking wand from her shawls and drew a symbol in the air – one that by now they were all familiar with.

Victor stared at it with unseeing eyes.

“You inscribed the word ‘wicked’ onto his heart,” Priscilla said, a hint of sorrow coloring her tone. “It should come as no surprise that his desires are wicked. Though if my time in Pompeii has proven anything, it is that a dragon’s heart can never be bought or sold, no matter the magic behind it…”

“In Hebrew it can translate to wicked, or twisted,” Constantine said. “It’s a twist on something pure.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Peter began murmuring to himself. “Okay. Let me get this straight – a dragon time-traveled us to a volcano – and he wants to destroy everything – and you – ” he turned to Charlie, “let this dragon fight in the Triwizard Tournament?!”

“We found him in Bulgaria!” Charlie said. “He was protecting an egg, we thought he was a she – ”

“Egg? What egg?” Priscilla demanded. “What did it look like?”

“Um… it was gold?” Charlie said.

“And what happened to it?” she pressed.

Charlie looked around uncomfortably. “I’d rather not say.”

“This is of the utmost importance, I assure you,” Priscilla said.

“I believe it was harvested for magical purposes,” Charlie said.

“What magical purposes do dragon eggs serve?” Hermione asked, perplexed.

Priscilla sighed heavily. “Besides having enchantments cast upon their innocent hearts? They have time-traveling properties. They are used to make time turners. I know this because I designed the time turners that are used by the Ministry of Magic.”

“So all dragons can time travel?” Charlie said, almost laughing. “How did I not know this?!”

“Well as you have probably seen,” Priscilla said, “a number of them appear to have rallied at this particular point in time. That’s the one thing I have not been able to gather from the divine realms – what motivates them? But this egg you spoke of – that could change things. This particular dragon, Rasha – ”

“Don’t say his name!” they all said at once.

“He’s arrived where he wanted – there’s no use trying to summon him now,” Priscilla said. “Anyway, this particular dragon, shall we say, ‘Wicked One,’ has his own purposes and wiles unlike any dragon I have seen before. And I have seen many, for they have been gathering for years, I assume awaiting his arrival, so the fact that he was guarding an egg is quite peculiar – ”

“I think I understand,” Constantine said. 

They all looked at him.

“His power supersedes yours,” he said to Victor, “because you inscribed his name in the language of the deep magic, the source of which is more powerful than you, and you took its purity and twisted it.”

Hermione blinked in wonderment. 

“And when he transported us the first time,” Hermione said, suddenly remembering, “I think he imparted… some of his feelings? Remember?”

“Like a Dementor!” Casey chimed in. “It was awful.”

“Well I did create Dementors…” Victor mumbled.

 _“You did what?”_ Hermione and Charlie both hollered.

“He is evil, I told you,” Sabrina said spitefully.

“I think the dragon wants to kill you,” Peter said.

“We should let it!” Gregory said.

“I may have a solution,” Priscilla said softly to Victor. “See, I too bred a dragon and inscribed powerful magic upon its heart.”

“You – you’re one of his followers!” Yitzhak accused. “Come,” he said, gesturing to Hermione, Charlie, and the students, “there is nothing these wicked ones, these Rasha can do for us. Yes, that is what became of the _Tzadikim,_ the righteous ones, but we dared not to speak their evil name! But they have taken their evil a step beyond what we knew to create the most wicked beast of all, who – as you’ve rightly pointed out – supersedes even their fell power for it has no will of its own, only the will of the wicked as has been inscribed upon the very strings of its heart!”

Another great rumble shook the earth beneath their feet.

“Put on these shawls, cover your faces – ” Priscilla said, frantically pulling linens out of a basket and passing them around to each person. She then burst through the doorway of the hut, everyone following suit, and looked to the sky which had darkened considerably. 

Glowing hot lava could be seen gurgling from the mouth of the volcano.

Priscilla closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and then calmly said, “Tiferet.”

A melodious cry filled the air and a shadow, like a cloud, quickly darkened the sky before a dragon touched down on the pebble beach before them. 

“Her name means beauty,” Priscilla said, approaching the dragon.

And the dragon was indeed beautiful. Unlike the Hungarian Horntail, this creature possessed an air of gracefulness, gently bowing her head to observe the unfamiliar faces and revealing startling amber eyes. Her scales were dark, yet luminescent in the sunlight. And while the Horntail was more lizard-like and fierce, Tiferet was… simply put… beautiful. 

Priscilla spoke in a foreign tongue to the dragon, and the dragon responded with a deep cooing sound. The dragon was adorned with something of a vest made of leather straps, presumably for the purpose of –

“Come,” Priscilla said, “we must ride to the top. Tiferet will take us.” Upon observing the unsure faces of the rest of the group, she added, “This is our only hope of returning.”

Hermione and Charlie, lost for words yet again, merely looked at each with apprehension. This would not be the first time for Hermione to ride a dragon, but she had rather hoped not to repeat the experience. Nonetheless, she ushered the begrudging students (except for Constantine who looked thrilled) atop the dragon who lifted her wing obligingly.

Priscilla scooted up to the top of the dragon, almost sitting on her head, while Hermione, Charlie, and the students squeezed in on her neck and back, barely leaving any room for Victor and Yitzhak to hang on to either side. The Medicine Woman whispered into Tiferet’s ear, and the magnificent creature kicked off from the ground in a swirl of pebbles.

All of a sudden the beach lie far below them as the blazing heat whipped across their faces, their shawls nearly falling off for their hands were all occupied by clinging onto the leather straps for dear life. Stealing glances amidst the harsh air blowing in her eyes, Hermione looked down to see great stone architectures far below – the city of Pompeii in all its glory before destruction.

The dragon soared up and up and finally made a loping dip, quickly approaching the heat of the fiery mountain. The specks they had seen flying about in the haze could now be seen, and they were not specks at all but fierce, terrifying creatures coming in a variety of shapes and sizes. Priscilla continued speaking in the dragon’s ear and she dipped down at last, landing them on a rocky crevice about midway down the mountain.

Following Priscilla’s prompting, they all dismounted and quickly wrapped the shawls around their faces once more, doubling over and coughing from the smoke. The lava spilled down, like molasses, about a hundred feet to the right of them.

“You must face him!” Priscilla yelled to Victor over the rumbling of the volcano. 

“How?” he yelled back. “Where is he?”

“He’s coming!” Peter yelled, pointing wildly to the left where, indeed, the Hungarian Horntail approached from the haze of smoke, his wings tightly at his side and his head bent malevolently.

His feet touched down behind Victor on the edge of the crevice and he stretched out his wings in a show of dominance, raising his head to the sky and shooting out great billows of fire. He then bent his head low again and his eyes glittered with malice as he stared straight at Victor and snarled. 

“Look!” Victor cried desperately. “Look, one of your kind! She too has a holy name, good and pure – ”

The Horntail’s eyes flickered to Tiferet standing behind Priscilla and the onlookers could tell that this caught him by surprise. 

Hermione, coughing from the swirling sulfur in the air, found herself disgusted by Victor’s attempt at distracting the dragon. If all that had been revealed were truly true, Victor almost sounded worse than Voldemort. And at this point in time, his dragon wanted recompense for the wickedness that he had had no say in – an interesting turn considering that being deemed “wicked” could have developed in any direction… The dragon could simply have taken after his master, but it appeared that the dragon, instead, resented his master.

The Horntail looked back and forth from Victor to Tiferet, clearly torn as to his next move. He scratched the rocky terrain with a heavy claw and then abruptly screeched out a jet-stream of fire directed at Victor, enveloping him in flames –

“Don’t look – ” Charlie said, moving to stand in front of the students.

Hermione let out an audible gasp and Sabrina cried in horror. Priscilla closed her eyes in resignation, as if she knew this were to happen.

The moment ended as quickly as it began and where Victor had stood there was now a pile of charred ash.

The dragon stamped his feet and let out a mighty roar that echoed all around with the roars of response from the other dragons that flew all around. While the students all marveled at the sight above their eyes, Hermione noticed Priscilla and Yitzhak sharing a silent communication.

“It’s time,” Priscilla said. “You must say his name.”

“What?” Charlie yelled as the volcano gurgled and rumbled, shaking the unsteady ground beneath them.

“His mission of wickedness is complete!” Priscilla said. “If you call upon his name now, he should return you to your time!”

“Should?” Gregory said.

“What about you?” Hermione said.

Priscilla looked to Yitzhak. “We have both engaged in deep magic that has blasphemed the very source of magic. We will stay here.”

The Horntail clawed the ground in agitation.

“Do it now!” Priscilla yelled.

Hermione looked to Constantine and he nodded.

_“Rasha.”_

The white flames erupted all around them, encircling Hermione, Charlie, and the five students, leaving Priscilla, Yitzhak, and Tiferet outside. Stars burst before their eyes as everything went black, and a new feeling emerged… Laughter, almost… Exuberance, but with some sinister quality about it... 

_Smack._

Hermione breathed in and knew where she was before opening her eyes, for the Forbidden Forest had a particular scent to it this time of year, of greenery and magic.

Once more, Charlie helped her to her feet and they found themselves inside the dragon enclosure, only there was no dragon.

“Dude… I wanna study dragons,” Peter said, getting to his feet.

“How do you create Dementors?” Casey wondered.

“I need to study ancient runes – and divination – and arithmancy – ” Constantine said frantically, counting off the subjects on his fingers.

Sabrina wore a worried expression.

“Have you ever studied time travel?” Hermione questioned. 

“No,” she said. “I mean, I know about time turners of course.”

“Do you know who was instrumental to the study of time turners?” Hermione said. “A witch by the name of Priscilla Sayre. She disappeared in the early 1900s – 1908, in fact – and it was presumed that one of her experiments went wrong.”

“Priscilla – _Sayre?”_ Sabrina said incredulously. 

Hermione smiled wryly. “If I’m not mistaken, she carried a wand quite similar to yours.”

“And what about you?” Charlie said to Gregory.

His brows were furrowed. “I’m intrigued… by ‘visceral magic.’ But I don’t want to end up like that guy.”

“What makes you say that?” Hermione said.

“Well… I reckon he was a bit full of himself,” Gregory said. “I… I can see how with a few missteps, I could end up like that.”

“You should study with me!” Constantine said. “You’re really smart and I’m really enthusiastic and know a lot of stuff you don’t know, we’d make a great pair.”

Hermione and Charlie laughed at Constantine’s brazenness. 

“Did you realize, for instance,” Constantine continued, “that once the dragon killed his master, his mission then became mating? I am certain he must have returned to Mount Vesuvius to mate with the other dragon! And when you pair wickedness and beauty… I shudder to think what their offspring will be like.”

“You’re so weird…” Gregory said, shaking his head. 

“HOW DID YOU GET IN THERE?” came the frantic voice of Aldous Finnegan, just on the other side of the window where they had previously been viewing the dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?!” the head dragon handler said, eyes wide and confused.

Hermione looked to Charlie, unsure of how to possibly begin explaining the situation or what might happen next. All she knew was that dragons were much more interesting than she’d previously thought, and so were dragon handlers. Charlie’s eyes twinkled.


End file.
